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Monday, August 13, 2012

2012 Olympic Closing Ceremonies (NBC, August 12, 2012)

After having dodged the
entire 2012 London Olympics Charles and I ended up watching the closing
ceremonies and an 80-minute wrap-up that preceded it of all the great moments
of the previous 16 days — including Michael Phelps’ last hurrah, the U.S.
women’s track relay team (all four of them were African-American and one of
them is married to a football player who’s been in the Super Bowl at least twice
— she did an interview in which she joked about which one would be the glory
hog, though frankly in this country it’s no contest: if she got all high-and-mighty about having
won an Olympic gold medal, someone who knew who her husband was would probably say
something like, “Well, at least your husband plays a sport most Americans have heard of!”), the U.S. women’s beach volleyball team (the
U.S. women did considerably better in the medals race than the U.S. men!) and
how well the host country did. The closing ceremony was over several tops,
complete with huge stage sets that looked like giant blowups of tabloid
newspaper pages but were really filled with quotes from famous British authors
(mostly the most famous one of all, Shakespeare) and a wide-ranging musical
program focused mostly on pop-rock, which as Charles pointed out has been one
of Britain’s key exports since the Beatles.

One of the groups represented was
One Direction, whom I’d barely heard of before but whose signature hit
“Beautiful” was … well, beautiful: no one expects a group of five teenage boys
who look well below the age where they could either drink alcohol or have sex
legally to do anything other than lightweight pop, but at least this is good lightweight pop, probably the most appealing
boy-band song I’ve heard since Hanson’s “mmm-Bop” and with much the same sort
of infectious power. (I also liked the fact that their lead singer was clearly
made up to look like the young Mick Jagger — though Charles joked, “Their fans
are too young even to have heard of Mick Jagger!”) After One Direction, the much-ballyhooed reunion of
the Spice Girls seemed even more lame than it would have otherwise! There were
a number of British pop-rock stars, including a few with genuinely serious
reputations, like Annie Lennox (if I heard her record of the song she sang last
night I’d probably like it, but she was stuck in the middle of a faux pirate ship and the accompaniment, poor miking and
lots of ambient noise made her
damned hard to hear) and Nick Mason of Pink Floyd, doing the song “Wish You
Were Here” (from the 1975 album that was the immediate follow-up to The Dark
Side of the Moon, and the title track and
“Shine On You Crazy Diamond” were both tributes to Floyd’s founding member Syd
Barrett, who’d been dropped from the band after its first album when he fried
his brain on acid and spent the remaining 30 years of his life as a crazy
recluse — though, ironically, he showed up when Pink Floyd were recording
“Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and tried to play guitar on the track, and the
remaining Floydsters escorted him out — which seems rather churlish to me: they
should have let him record a track, since with modern mixing and editing
techniques they could always have edited it out if it were unusable, and if they
had let him contribute it
might have been what he needed to break out of his shell) with the lead being
sung by a short but appealingly gnomish singer in an orange jacket (he’d be
good casting for one of the Hobbits if they ever do The Lord of the Rings: The
Musical).

The show droned on and
on and on, one big spectacular
number after another — including an oddly tame tribute to Rio de Janeiro, who’s
hosting the games in 2016, and two of the biggest ovations all night came for
currently deceased singers who were included in the show via film clips: John
Lennon singing part of “Imagine” and Freddie Mercury singing something about
Rio that led into a live performance of “We Will Rock You” (not “We Are the Champions”?) with the other principal
Queenster, Brian May (he was their co-leader, lead guitarist, and he wrote half
their songs — including some of their biggest hits — but he’s virtually
forgotten now, ironically, because he’s the one who’s still alive) and a dance
diva named Jessie J taking the vocal — and doing it spectacularly well,
suggesting that if Queen wants to make a comeback as a major attraction maybe
what they need to do is replace Freddie Mercury with a woman (the way Big
Brother and the Holding Company replaced Janis Joplin with a man, Nick Gravenites)
— earlier she, another female dance diva and a Black soul-rap singer had come
out each inside a sun-roofed car (and the cars looked like Jaguars but had
their steering wheels on the left side, as you’d expect in the U.S. but not in Britain) — the Black artist’s song was a big
enough hit on this side of the pond I recognized it but the two white girls, as
impressive as they looked in their skin-tight see-through costumes, were pretty
bland; but when Jessie J (whom I joked was driving around the Olympic stadium
looking for the rest of her last name) got to sing with the surviving members
of Queen and belt out one of their legendary rock hits, she sounded beautiful
and soulful.

There were older musicians there who were less impressive,
including George Michael (he sang “Freedom” right after the clip of John Lennon
singing “Imagine” — a hard enough act to follow under any circumstances — and
he seemed lost on stage among all his Black backup singers; I joked to Charles
that you’d know who George Michael was because he was the only white person on
stage for that number!) and the Pet Shop Boys (it was nice to know that their
big breakthrough hit “West End Girls” actually does contain more lyrics than just “the East End boys,
the West End girls,” but I’m still less than impressed even though Charles
actually saw Neil Tennant once in London and that made me look a bit more
fondly on them than I had before — that and they once put out a CD whose cover
was a piece of orange plastic that looked like it came from a road sign); the Los
Angeles Times reported that Ray Davies
performed (that I would have liked to see;
I always had a soft spot for the Kinks because out of all the British Invasion
bands, they were the one that was the most defiantly British: they inserted
more British cultural references than any of their Invasion-era rivals and they
— deliberately, Davies said in a recent interview — sang with their authentic
British accents instead of trying to adopt American ones like the Beatles and
the Stones did) but he didn’t appear on the NBC telecast, and with the night
getting late and both of us having early appointments the next day, we turned
off the show at 11 p.m. and didn’t get to see the final performance by the Who
(well, Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey with whomever they’ve been able to
scare up on bass and drums, anyway), who reportedly did four songs of which the
last was “My Generation” (and yes, it’s odd for people in their 60’s to be
singing a song whose most famous line is “Hope I die before I get old”!), which
for some strange reason only the “suits” at NBC could explain was separated
from the rest by local news shows and an allegedly commercial-free preview of
what seemed like a decidedly unfunny “comedy” that takes place in a veterinary
hospital. NBC was doing a major promo to the effect that “comedy is coming
back” to the Peacock Network … well, judging from the clips they showed of
their alleged “comedy” shows, that is definitely a matter of opinion!